Left to right: Incumbent Nicollet County District 1 Commissioner Marie Dranttel, St. Peter City Councilor Darrell Pettis and Minnesota State University Associate Professor of Social Work Jennifer Andrashko are competing for the District 1 seat on the Nicollet County Board.
Left to right: Incumbent Nicollet County District 1 Commissioner Marie Dranttel, St. Peter City Councilor Darrell Pettis and Minnesota State University Associate Professor of Social Work Jennifer Andrashko are competing for the District 1 seat on the Nicollet County Board.
With the Aug. 9 primary less than a week away, voters will decide which two of the three candidates running for the Nicollet County Board of Commissioners District 1 seat should be sent to the November ballot.
Incumbent Nicollet County District 1 Commissioner Marie Dranttel, St. Peter City Councilor Darrell Pettis and Minnesota State University Associate Professor of Social Work Jennifer Andrashko are competing for the District 1 seat on the Nicollet County Board.
Through her 15 years of experience as a social worker serving incarcerated parents in the county jail system, families with a child in a mental health crisis and families experiencing homelessness, Jennifer Andrashko has seen firsthand the parts of government that are meeting the needs of people and the policies that are failing.
The associate professor of social work at Minnesota State University, Mankato filed her candidacy in hopes of leveraging “the power of local government to do good.”
“One of the most powerful ways to advocate for change is to grow the intersection between people who write policy and people whose lives are most impacted by those policies,” said Andrashko. “I have spent much of my career doing that in social work and teaching social work policy and inviting social work students and future social workers to consider advocacy and policy work.”
Beyond social work and academia, Andrashko previously served as a member of the MNSure Health Industry Advisory Board and was appointed to the state Maternal Mortality Review Board by Health Commissioner Jan Malcolm in 2021.
The St. Peter resident’s top priority is investing in the county’s mental health and substance abuse infrastructure to meet the needs of residents having trouble accessing care, particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We need to balance the levy itself with the things we know we need to provide for our constituencies,” said Andrashko. “One of the ways we know we can do this in Minnesota is to consider advocating for the reinvestment of a county tax — which every county pays to the state — so that each county can get its own dollars that they’ve paid in back from the state and invest them into building local mental health services and infrastructure within the county system.”
Andrashko also emphasized continuing to build county-city and county-state partnerships toward improvements to roads and bridges, building out broadband access with public-private partnerships and creating water storage.
On spending American Rescue Plan dollars, Andrashko advised the county should prioritize human services infrastructure, disability infrastructure, affordable housing and water quality projects.
Data included is taken from the Minnesota Department of Health Daily reports. Because all data is preliminary, the change in number of cumulative positive cases and deaths from one day to the next may not equal the newly reported cases or deaths.
